Your Face in Mine

by Jess Row

  That year was the happiest I have ever had. Wudeng then was still a small town, and we woke up with the roosters, the shouts of fruit sellers and dumpling vendors on their early rounds, and gusts of cold air through the windows that smelled like the river. We had a tiny table I’d nailed together out of two packing crates, and every morning we brewed a pot of Nescafé and sat together, reading, grading papers, listening to Bach or Brahms on my CD player from home. In the afternoons, after my classes, I sat with Xiyun on the front stoop, drinking tea out of glass jars, watching the children running home from school. He could quote long passages from Du Fu, Li Bai, Su Shi, and Li Qingzhao, but his favorite was Tao Qian, the first and greatest recluse of Chinese poetry:

  From the eastern hedge, I pluck chrysanthemum flowers,

  And idly look toward the southern hills.

  The mountain air is beautiful day and night,

  The birds fly back to roost with one another.

  I know that this must have some deeper meaning,

  I try to explain, but cannot find the words.

  What I loved the most were the times when an old woman from the neighborhood would stop with a load of vegetables on one shoulder and complain loudly about her arthritis, or pass on a shred of gossip, without giving me a second glance, as if my presence was no more remarkable than anyone else’s. I felt almost as if I had grown a second skin, or passed into some ghostly state, a hologram. Of course, that was a fantasy. Everyone knew we would leave, eventually, that Wendy had married me to leave. It was almost a point of pride. But in that process, somehow, I had become part of the story.

  Would I have wanted it any other way? Would I have wanted to stay for good? It’s pointless to dwell on hypotheticals. Modern Chinese law does technically permit foreigners to become naturalized, but the spirit of the law is jus sanguinis. The law of blood. Foreign-born children of Chinese parents can give up their citizenship and return, with difficulty, but no Westerner has ever actually become a Chinese citizen. There are permanent residency cards for a tiny privileged few—millionaire investors, tenured professors—but for anyone else, for me, to stay in China, even if I could keep a job, would have meant a yearly trip to Seoul to renew my visa. A permanent temporary worker. Wendy and I could have had ten children and it would be the same. Beyond all that, I wouldn’t have been able to stand it, as the only one, the Wudeng laowai, the Pearl S. Buck of the village—a freak of nature, like an albino, or a six-fingered man. I loved it, but only in the most impossible way; and then I took Wendy away with me. Though she knew it was a terrible cliché, and it was hideously embarrassing, especially in front of my friends, she never tired of saying America is my dream come true. We lived in the States for eight years, and never went back to China, even after she got her green card. I don’t need to, she said, when I questioned her. I’ve had enough China for one lifetime.

  —

  The great miracle of our relationship was that we rarely needed to discuss anything, our lives so perfectly intertwined. At least that was how it seemed to me. When we moved to Cambridge, on one student stipend and a loan from my parents, she walked into the Yenching Library and was hired as a cataloging clerk on the spot, complete with an approved work visa. Three years later, after I finished my general exams, in the fall of 2000, she said, I want to go off the pill; we conceived Meimei just after Christmas.

  It’s true that she was extremely quiet, eerily so, by American standards, and I had to press her to tell me what she was thinking. At times I grew exhausted and snapped at her, sure she was silently judging me, playing the passive-aggressive. But for the most part she was just watching. The world was new to her. I’ve never met anyone less inclined to make up her mind about abstractions. In day-to-day life she simply never needed to deliberate.

  There’s something about you, she said to me, once, after we’d been in Cambridge six months. You’re not like other Americans. It’s a surprise to me. You’re—what is it? Quiet? Cool? Calm?

  You tell me.

  Bland, she said. Is that right? Not as an insult. As a compliment.

  Are you saying I’m more Chinese?

  Don’t be ridiculous. What does that mean, more Chinese?

  More like a typical Chinese person.

  I don’t know any typical Chinese person. But I think I understand you. You’re like a character from an old story. Like a monk. A Taoist monk. Passive.

  That’s not a compliment. To an American, anyway.

  Careful. Can I say that? Careful?

  I am careful. That much is true. I hold back. I reserve judgment. I take more time than I should to consider the consequences, you could say. I was that way in college, before we met, all through our relationship, in the aftermath, and now. My entire adult life.

  There’s a reason for that, I should have told her. Though I never did. And I can’t tell you, either, quite yet.

  —

  My apartment—the upstairs floor of a town house on Palmer Street, in Charles Village—is really still just our old house, re-created in miniature. She bought the furniture, re-sanded and re-stained it; she chose the gauzy curtains, the kilim in the living room, the calligraphy scrolls, the old Shanghai movie posters framed above the dining table, souvenirs Xiyun picked up in the Fifties. In the kitchen I’ve framed three of Meimei’s paintings, from what we called her green phase: pictures of horses, elephants, mice, cars, all made of neat green balloons and labeled, helpfully, in her three-year-old scrawl.

  • • •

  The circumstances of the accident were never fully explained, at least in a way I could understand, but the bare outline is this: Wendy and Meimei were driving east on Storrow Drive, on a wet November day, in a car she’d borrowed from a friend, an old Audi station wagon. The brakes failed, or the car hydroplaned, or probably, most likely, both: it crashed through a guardrail, rolled over a narrow strip of grass, and went into the Charles, and they drowned. There’s no way to avoid saying it. Wendy managed to get out of her seat belt and into the back, and their bodies were intertwined, of course; she was trying to unbuckle Meimei’s restraining harness.

  For a month I hardly left the house. My bosses at WBUR—I’d gone to work there two years before, while still working on my dissertation, and had put off looking for an academic job until I realized I no longer wanted one—had given me six weeks’ paid leave, and I spent most of it in my attic study, or on the living room couch, compulsively reading. I read War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, The Tale of Genji, the complete Journey to the West, The Dream of the Red Chamber. At night, to relax, I watched two or three movies in a row. One night I watched Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, all nine hours, and woke up on the couch at noon the next day, freezing, the blanket fallen off, hardly able to move. A friend of mine from graduate school, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, sent me a care package of his own hand-grown hydroponic indica packed in Kona coffee cans; I smoked it twice a day, at eleven and six, to give myself an appetite, and then went out and ate unbearably spicy meals. Shrimp vindaloo, extra-hot. Jerk chicken with pickled Scotch bonnet peppers on the side. Guizhou-style lamb hot pot. Otherwise I couldn’t taste anything at all.

  I walled in my life with stimuli, or tried to, anyway; if I had been a different person, or in a different frame of mind, I would have spent all the life insurance money in one go, on a Fiji vacation or a Lamborghini. Grief permanently alters the mind, my therapist said. Don’t underestimate its power. He asked me to do a simple exercise. When you wake up in the morning, immediately ask yourself, what kind of person am I today? Make a commitment: I am sad but getting better. I am focused. I return phone calls. It worked for a while, but I realized, months later, that it made the underlying problem worse. I took small steps; that created the illusion I was getting better.

  Grief makes you temporarily invisible: a fugitive in your own place, in your own time. That’s not news. What frightened me, when I g
ained just enough traction to begin to think about it, was that I didn’t mind so much. In fact, it seemed like a confirmation of who I already was. Snuggled inside my nearly middle-aged soul, wombed inside my happy fatherhood, was a creature who would use the excuse of mourning just to buy time, until no one expected me to heal or move on. I thought, for a while, that I would make an excellent crank: bushy-bearded, in a torn T-shirt, getting by on disability or food stamps, walled into my apartment with books and manuscripts. I could teach myself Sanskrit and Tibetan and ancient Greek. I could rot on a bench in Harvard Square, part of a venerable tradition, mumbling fragments of Aristophanes.

  Finally, obviously, I realized I had to leave. Cambridge was unbearable; my house was unbearable; and my job, which I had loved, the office of program development and planning, had turned into a pale tunnel of drawn faces and outreaching hands. I had become a kind of obelisk of grief, a freak of disaster, and for young women, especially—women I cared about, and mean no disrespect toward—there was something almost pornographic about the way they looked at me, something almost exuberant about all that horror and pity.

  The recruiter—no more than a voice to me, Lois, a woman speaking from Boulder, who did this for a living, matching NPR and PRI stations and staff—said to me, this is a bit of an unusual one. It’s a fixer-upper. In fact, it’s in real trouble. WBCC, in Baltimore, have you heard of it? Probably not. It’s second-tier, community radio, independent license, free-form music during the day—kind of a turkey, if you ask me. They’ve got big money problems. But look, they need a PM now, and they’ll take you for sure, experience or no. Have you been? Baltimore’s a nice town. Super-cheap. Lots of character. Forty-five minutes from D.C.—

  —No, no, I said, I’m from there. No need to explain.

  • • •

  Two days after the funeral, Wendy’s father called me from Wudeng, using the new cell phone she’d bought for him online a few weeks before. There was no way for them to come; they’d held their own funeral and put up tablets in the family tomb, with a local Taoist priest officiating. Afterward, he said, someone had asked him if it was appropriate to enter Meimei’s name in the family record, given that her father was a laowai, that she wasn’t fully Chinese. I would have hit him, he said, only your mother-in-law stopped me. I told him, you will not slander the name of my only grandchild.

  I held the line for a full minute, listening to him gasping for breath on the other end.

  You should come back to Wudeng, he said; you should teach here again. There are always jobs, you know. You could translate. There’s the new Honda factory over in Xiling, I’m sure they could use you for something. Native English speakers are worth more than gold now, he said, repeating a constant cliché in the news. Live with us, in your old apartment.

  And how could I come back to Wudeng without Wendy? I asked him. How would it look?

  You’re still our family, he said. You’re all the family we have now. American, Chinese, I don’t care anymore. I used to hate you for taking Wendy away. Now none of that matters. You still have a duty to us. Not money. I don’t care about money. We need someone.

  I can’t, I said. I can’t.

  Not now. Maybe sometime, he said. The offer is open. You understand? As long as we’re alive, the offer is open.

  4.

  Mort Kepler is already sitting in my office when I arrive, fifteen minutes early. He’s given up raking the sand in my miniature Zen garden, and now sits back, one hiking boot propped on the radiator, flipping through the latest issue of Station Manager with the tiny bamboo rake still held delicately between two chubby fingers like a cigarette. Sorry, he says, thumping his foot back on the floor. I had the insomnia again last night. Winona kicked me out of bed at five-thirty, and Starbucks wasn’t open. So I came to work. Isn’t that sad?

  Something I can do for you?

  Oh, he says, I want to talk about a twenty percent raise and two more PAs for Baltimore Voices. That okay with you? Just kidding. Don’t look so serious, I’m breaking your balls again. But we should talk about how we’re going to present this to the board.

  The most regrettable thing about Mort Kepler is that he’s a legend mostly—but not entirely—in his own mind. He spent the late Sixties and much of the Seventies as a Sun reporter covering civil rights and the peace movement, and published a collection of pieces, Notes from the American Front, that created a bit of a stir in 1981. Later, in the Eighties, he moved to the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation in South Dakota and taught high school English, took up an affair with a seventeen-year-old, Winona, and somehow arranged for her to land a full scholarship at Goucher College, landing them back in Baltimore before the scandal broke. Not long after that he began his career as a public radio host, first on a small Delaware station and now here, where he’s become a local institution, on a very small scale. His lunchtime call-in show takes all comers—the Nation of Islam, Pentecostal Israelophiles, 9/11 Truthers, lesbian separatists, Christian vegans. Last year the station spent nearly $10,000 on FCC fines, all of them for Baltimore Voices; our PAs can’t always tell who might begin screaming obscenities the moment they go on the air. Never mind, Mort told me, in my first meeting with him, it’s all part of the struggle, the never-ending struggle.

  I was born in 1974, on the day Nixon left office. He tells this to visitors, sometimes, with a bark of bright anger and amusement. Kids, he says, the world is overrun with kids. We might as well just pack it in.

  Mort, I say, I’m sorry, I’m a little foggy this morning. Present what to the board?

  You didn’t get my email last night? Shit! He smacks his forehead theatrically. I’ll bet I sent it to the wrong address. I got a bad habit of forgetting the last dot, you know, dot E-D-U? He rummages in his bag and produces a rumpled document, four or five pages, single-spaced. The Outreach Committee’s new plan, he says. There are some brilliant ideas in there. We want to start a whole new revamped internship program. That actually brings some interns in the door this time.

  Good, I say, so I’ll look at this, and can we meet tomorrow? Same time? Bright and early?

  Okay. Tomorrow’s okay. But the only problem is, the board meeting’s Thursday. That doesn’t give us much time to prepare.

  Right, I say, but I have to read this, Mort, and make sure I can sign off on it, and then Barbara has to look at the numbers and put them in the budget proposal—

  You sure? I mean, we’re talking three cents on the overall dollar. The PD’s approval has always been pretty pro forma.

  Well, I say, look, Mort, I just got here. And if I start doing things pro forma without looking at them first, nobody’s going to be very happy.

  You mean the board won’t be.

  Well, them. Them and others.

  Sometimes in the middle of conversations like this I have a sense of my body tilting upward, till it’s parallel with the ground, and I’m looking down at my own office, like a dream swimmer. I hear a certain throbbing in my eardrums, and I see the serious look on the face of the person across from me—because when people come into my office they’re always serious, always wanting something, and yet having to pretend that it’s for the good of the station, the public interest, the city, the earth. The cringing, the apologies, the hand wringing, all for a few hundred dollars to attend a conference at a community college in Atlanta! And then I want to burst out laughing. I want to pop open a mini-fridge and hand out cans of Coors Light. We’re choking on our own piety in this business, and yet here I am, parish priest of this tiny church of public radio, waving my hands and dispensing indulgences.

  Kelly, Mort says, is it all right if I cut the bullshit for a moment?

  Please.

  I just want to give you a little feedback on how things are going. Now that it’s been a month. I—we—look, we’re concerned about the level of inclusivity. We feel, some people feel, that you’re not taking the committee structure seriously.


  Would you like me to respond honestly? I ask. He nods. Mort, I say, I don’t. I can’t. And then I do something I’ve promised myself not to do, in fact to avoid at any cost: I open my top drawer, the locked drawer, and take out a green folder, an as-now-empty folder with the words Station Audit in the little plastic window.

  Last month we received our disaffiliation papers from NPR. As of December first, they’re cutting us off. Chronic nonpayment or late payment of annual fees. Decline in listenership across the brackets. Weakness in local programming. That’s what they said. It’s all itemized. We’re going to have an all-staff meeting next week and I’ll give the full presentation.

  He’s been following me, squinting, mouthing the words.

  I knew it, he says. You’re one of those fucking turnaround artists. You’re Neutron Jack. Look, am I fired? Just tell me now.

  Of course you’re not fired. You’re promoted.

  To what?

  Director of outreach.

  No more committees? None of them?

  Network policy is that we have to have a standard governance structure.